Traditional radio stations broadcast a single broadcast stream providing identical content to everyone listening to the radio, regardless of its relevance to the individual listeners. This “one size fits all” approach delivers the same information to everyone listening, irrespective of his or her interest, needs, or location. Moreover, broadcast radio is unable to determine when individual listeners tune in and tune out. As a result, the conventional broadcast repeats a shallow depth of generic information in an attempt to deliver all of the information to all of the listeners. While such generic content may be the best compromise to broadcasting to a large group of people, individual listeners may be interested in only a portion of the general content that is relevant to their location, neighborhood, interests, and lifestyle.
Lack of personalization is a problem with all types of broadcast media, but it is particularly relevant to news radio. In news radio, information that is specific to one geographic area may be completely irrelevant to people listening in other geographic areas. Yet, radio stations in large metro areas cover hundreds of miles and report the same content to each of the different regions contained within the metro area. For example, a listener may become disinterested or even frustrated when listening to long traffic reports for areas in which she is not driving, sports updates for teams she does not follow, or events in neighborhoods she does not live or visit. In response, a listener must switch to different radio stations to find the information she likes or to avoid listening to information in which she has no interest.
Using traffic information as an example to illustrate the problems with generic broadcasts, in many regions, consumers rely heavily on the traffic information provided by radio stations to determine their expected time of arrival to their destination. Consumers also use the traffic information in order to decide if they should take an alternate route to reach their destination in light of the reported traffic or automobile accident. Accordingly, timeliness and relevancy of traffic information is important to these listeners. However, traditional radio stations provide general traffic information to cover the entire broadcast region and typically only report the traffic on a predetermined schedule, e.g., once every ten minutes. As a result, the listeners at one end of the city are provided the same information as those listeners at the other and the length of the traffic report is necessarily extended to provide comprehensive information. This is not an ideal solution for each listener (or really for any listener). Although traffic news is the example used, these problems are typical for any media broadcast.
Further to that point, media content is often time-sensitive. As examples, weather reports and traffic reports are often only valid for a short window of time before they become irrelevant. In addition, there are important times to receive weather and traffic reports, such as when preparing to leave the house. However, because traditional media content is broadcast and consumed in real-time, media content both may become stale and may not be delivered at the opportune moment. For example, a listener may leave the house, get into the car, and turn on the radio. If the listener has just missed the traffic report, he or she may need to wait another 10 minutes (or more) before the traffic report is repeated. By that time, the listener may have already gotten deep enough into the commute that the report will no longer be as useful because the listener is either at his or her destination or in the midst of the traffic.
A further problem with conventional media broadcasts, particularly radio news and talk shows is that certain media stories will be broadcast without regard to age-sensitive material. For example, the news may include topics related to a murder case or a bank robbery, sexual assault, marijuana being legal, poverty in Africa, or a devastation of a tsunami in Japan. However, such material may be inappropriate for children, or other sensitive listeners, to hear. When a listener is confronted with inappropriate content while listening with sensitive listeners (for example, a parent driving a car with young children), the listener must turn off the radio or hastily switch to a different station to avoid the content. The inability for traditional media broadcasts to enable a user to personally choose how to filter inappropriate content is a problem.
In summary, the problems with broadcast media include an overload of generalized information, providing information that is not relevant to the listeners based on the listener's preferences and/or location, and providing information that is not delivered at an optimal time, and a lack of filtering of broadcast media.